Local Super Men

Real-life super men don’t believe they have superpowers. They believe in
the powers of their communities to unite in times of need. Whether they’re jumpstarting disaster recovery, giving a voice to the dispossessed or helping mend ill hearts.

Tad Agoglia

First Response Team of America, Lancaster

Hurricanes whose names go down in history—Sandy, Katrina. Tornadoes that rip entire towns off their foundations. An earthquake that leveled half a nation.

When devastation hits, Tad Agoglia is there, before dazed residents can even reassess their lives. The Lancaster resident—a CNN 2008 Hero of the Year—arrives with the First Response Team of America, fully equipped with demolition equipment and generators. At no charge, the team clears blocked roads, razes shattered buildings and powers dark buildings.

“When people are so down and out, when almost everything has gone wrong, they grasp on to things that will encourage them, and it gives them strength to move on,” says Agoglia. “It gives them strength to start that process of cleaning up and rebuilding, and it gives them one more reason to have hope.”

In 2007, Agoglia had a thriving business, contracting to clean up after natural disasters. But he wouldn’t arrive for weeks, and he realized that residents needed to start clearing debris from day one. He poured his savings into transforming the business into the nonprofit First Response Team (firstresponseteam.org).

Since then, he has built a recovery staging site in Haiti, rescued stranded flood victims in Norfolk, Virginia, cleaned oil-soaked Louisiana beaches, and cleared tornado-ravaged Joplin, Missouri.

“I have discovered that there is no great or small contribution,” he says. “We can demolish 100 homes after a tornado, or you can hand teddy bears to preschool children. To each one of those recipients, it can mean the world.”

When Sandy slammed the East Coast, the First Response team weathered the storm in Long Island, New York. In the aftermath, they were ready for work in Long Island and seven other communities when residents emerged to a radically changed landscape. For the first 10 days, “there was so much widespread damage that one of the things we did was just open roads wide enough for fire trucks to get through.”

Fundraising to fuel equipment and pay staff—volunteers won’t do when team members need specialized skills and mobilize for weeks at a time—is “a huge challenge,” Agoglia says. The team draws strength from Lancaster and carries a piece of their world-renowned community to every job. When disaster victims ask why they drove all that heavy equipment across the country, they say, “This is what we do in Lancaster. You’re our neighbor, just a little farther away.”

“People can’t help but believe it, not only because we actually did it but because that’s what Lancaster is known for,” Agoglia says.

It’s “part of being human” to help others when hardship occurs, Agoglia believes.

“We should take on this sense that it’s the right thing to do to recognize the need around you and try to lend a hand if and how you can. It’s almost like we take out the trash every day; we take a shower every day. There’s certain things that become part of our lives.”

Jeffrey D. Lobach

Barley Snyder, York

Just out of law school, Jeffrey Lobach served high-profile clerkships with two state Supreme Court justices in Philadelphia. But soon, he returned to his home town of York to join a small but vibrant law firm.

“I could deal with clients who were really likeable and fun to be with and could turn into your friends, and have intellectually stimulating colleagues and do good, exciting work in a little town, which is kind of the best of both worlds,” he says. “I loved Philadelphia but felt I could have more of an impact here.”

Lobach talks enthusiastically about his community involvements in health, education, history, and scouting. And he spins a hair-raising yarn about the work that put York on the global stage and gave hope to hundreds—the Golden Venture saga.

The Golden Venture was a ship crammed with nearly 300 Chinese refugees that ran aground near New York in 1993. The Clinton Administration vowed deportation, to send China a “tough on immigration” message. Many refugees were detained in York County Prison. Lobach, president of the York County Bar Association at the time, had been preaching the gospel of pro bono work, and a call came asking if association members could represent detainees.

“We had no idea we were just being used as props to make it look like they got a fair hearing,” Lobach says.

Judges denied every asylum request, and an outraged community realized they had been used as “some backwater” for quietly deporting the refugees to China, Lobach says. “The people of York got their back up.”

Vigils and legal action made the Golden Venture a national cause. Lobach and his wife, Cindy, helped lead the fight. Though many refugees eventually returned to China, some won asylum appeals or were paroled. The Lobach family took in a Tiananmen Square activist whom Lobach successfully defended and who is now a business owner with a daughter who considers the Lobachs her grandparents.

“I found out about this community, that it’s a pretty welcoming place,” Lobach says of the Golden Venture legacy. “That was not a universally held view, and our house was egged and we got crank calls all the time, but there was a large body of folks who had sympathy.”

Lobach remains passionate about community causes, chairing boards and overseeing strategic and fundraising campaigns for diverse institutions, including WellSpan Health, York Health Foundation, York County Community Foundation, and the Boy Scouts of America’s New Birth of Freedom Council. For a son’s Eagle Scout project, he helped take dental care to an isolated rain forest village. He is writing a history of his 200-year-old church. Through it all, a mutt named Lobo is often at his side.

He sums it up neatly. “There are so many opportunities to do things if you want to.”

Larry Silver

I.O. Silver Foundation, Harrisburg

Larry Silver’s father had always taken care of everyone else, but he wasn’t watching his own health. At age 83, he finally agreed to heart bypass surgery. In recovery, Larry Silver sat with his father. Every time he got up to leave, his father would say, “There’s something I want to tell you.”

“That’s what he’d do when he didn’t want you to leave,” Silver recalls. “I went back to the room and wrote a letter to him, which he kept until he died. He was my hero, and I told him that.”

Silver’s eyes mist as he tells the story. The legendary physician I.O. Silver—I for Israel, O for Oscar—was born in Steelton in 1909, the son of a Latvian-born grocer. By the time he died in 1994, he had built a legacy of caring and civic engagement that resonated throughout Pennsylvania but was anchored firmly in his beloved Steelton.

In memory of the dad who was also a best friend, Larry Silver raises funds for the Penn State Hershey Heart and Vascular Institute.

“If my dad walked into a room—I don’t care who was there: legislators, the archbishop of the Catholic church—they all came over to see I.O.,” says Silver, a retired obstetrician and gynecologist. “He just was everything to everybody.”

Silver created the I.O. Silver Foundation (iosilverfoundation.org) in 1996. Since 2008, the foundation—no staff, just Silver and devoted supporters —has staged a yearly gala fashion show at the Hotel Hershey. The foundation has contributed more than one million dollars for HVI clinical (Heart and Vascular Institute), educational, and research initiatives. Silver could have stopped after fulfilling a pledge to raise half a million dollars for the institute, “but by this time, I was hooked on heart,” he says. “Even as a doctor, I was in awe of what they did.”

“This isn’t just a regular you-have-a-heart-attack place,” he says. “There are lots of different branches in cardiac surgery. They have gone all over the country and the world and found guys that are tops in these niches and brought them here. It’s amazing what they do. It really is amazing.”

The fashion show features messages from HVI patients—a bypass recipient, the teen with the rare heart condition who’s now a dean’s list college student, the cousins whose transplants succeeded for an inherited condition that claimed the lives of other relatives, young children who need long-term treatment until they’re old enough for transplants.

Keeping I.O. Silver’s legacy alive in the name of heart care is perhaps most appropriate not because the dad died of cardiovascular disease, but because the son draws inspiration from a man who devoted his heart to every person he met.

“I didn’t want him to be forgotten, not because he was my father but because he was an amazing guy. Always giving things. Giving, giving.”